Smart Cities in Egypt: Utilising Techno-Utopianism to Prevent Democratic Participation
I returned to Cairo in the summer of 2023, after 6 years. Naïvely, I expected to return to the Cairo of my childhood: sprawling streets, dense traffic lanes, cacophonies of car horns.
But almost immediately -on the drive from the airport, located on the outskirts of the city, moving towards downtown Cairo- I was reminded of my arrogance, my presumption that, sans my presence, the city I loved would not dare change. The roads we were driving on: wide, empty highways, were not the roads of my memories, but symptomatic of a vast amount of infrastructure development.
For a country ranked second most at risk of a debt crisis after Ukraine, this may have seemed a pleasant surprise: an array of bridges and wide highways, all adorned with posters of President Abdel Fateh El Sisi’s face, or -slightly more subtly- an array of Egyptian flags.
Utilising any opportunity to practise my now-broken Arabic, I asked our taxi driver. – framing it in such a way that an ever-patriotic Egyptian would find flattering — waxing lyrical about how beautiful the new highways and bridges were. Wholly unimpressed, he muttered something along the lines of “There is a shortage of cigarettes and petrol, but they are building bridges with Arab money”, referencing the extensive cash injections into Egypt from the UAE.
He was similarly unimpressed when I pointed out a sign pointing towards ‘The New Administrative Capital’ -the first I had heard of this effort- simply stating that “Cairo will always be the capital, no matter what the [he] builds in her place.” The implicit reference to President Abdel Fattah el Sisi meant that the conversation quickly dwindled after that, with politics (siyasa) a risky topic of conversation in post-revolutionary Egypt, not least with a foreigner in your passenger seat.
Egypt’s New Administrative (Smart) Capital
A cursory google once we arrived home, and to my embarrassment, I discovered that the creation of the New Administrative Capital (NAC) was announced in March 2015, when I was still living in Cairo. I felt slightly better upon reading an assessment that ‘We, Cairenes and Egyptians, were not informed, let alone consulted about this move’.
More research showed that not only is the NAC yet another gated district, but it promises to be an ultra-modern, smart city (with a projected completion cost of £47 billion), replacing Cairo as Egypt’s capital.
The European Commission defines a smart city as:
‘a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of data and digital solutions for the benefit of its inhabitants’
And the digital solutions promised are a world away from the Cairo I knew: a single app for paying utility bills, accessing local services and reporting complaints and problems. Residents will use smart cards and apps to unlock doors and make payments. They will surf the web on public WiFi beamed from lampposts. Advanced technology systems will help reduce waste by detecting leaks or faults, as well as increasing sustainability through allowing residents to measure their consumption.
There are no publicly available details on how these systems will be built or maintained. Still, they echo the Egyptian government’s assertion that this city will be a ‘model of inclusive and sustainable urban development in the Middle East’, a promise of seamless, smooth, integrated and intelligent urbanisation.
This statement is reminiscent of visions of smart cities as apolitical techno-utopian solutions, where it is assumed that smart technologies alone will lead to better urban futures.
And yet, critiques of this sentiment assert that smart city technologies inherently involve value judgments and power dynamics. Decisions about what data to collect, how to analyze it, and how to utilize the insights gained ultimately reflect specific political priorities and agendas.
In fact, something more familiar about this new city was the assertion that a network of at least 6,000 cameras will monitor activity on every street, tracking pedestrians and vehicles to regulate traffic and report suspicious activity.
When viewed in isolation, this is a testament to the ability of the NAC city to promote safety and efficiency, but in a country with a noted history of systematic political repression and tight control over public space, it gives many cause for concern.
“Planting surveillance cameras across the city gives authorities an unparalleled ability to police public spaces and crack down on citizens who wish to protest or exercise their right to peaceful assembly,” said Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager at digital rights group Access Now.
A Citizen's Right to a Smart City
A brief reminder of the sociopolitical situation in Egypt currently: President Sisi has ruled the country since 2014, when he led a coup that deposed Mohamed Morsi, elected after a Jan 2011 uprising that ended the 30-year reign of Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak.
If we return to 2011, Egyptians learnt -as Mohamed Elshahed wrote in the midst of the revolution, that
“[the] fight for democracy [was] inseparably linked to their ability to assemble in urban space.”
This has been termed as Caireans reclaiming their ‘right to the city’; a way of enhancing democratic empowerment through occupying space in novel ways, as a right of participation and its appropriation, as a way to answer existing ‘problems of disenfranchisement’.
But the powers that be learnt from the mistakes of their predecessors. In 2015, Sisi’s regime effectively eliminated the right to peaceful assembly or demonstration. Today, the government has erected a large metal gate to prevent marches towards Tahrir Square; the epicentre of the 2011 revolution. In an act of irony so stark it is almost cruel, this gate is painted with the Egyptian flag.
Within this context, the smart city of the NAC, framed within the lens of improved efficiency, sustainability, and citizen engagement, becomes just another opportunity to engineer and manage urban space in Cairo. The smart technologies proposed may yet be used for civic participation, protection of civil liberties or crime prevention. And yet, this is doubtful, as evidenced by the lack of civic participation in the planning of the city itself. Instead, they lend themselves towards data-driven policing and deep control.
In Egypt’s case, the smart technologies of the NAC work as an instrument to engineer Egyptian society to create a ‘new state’, echoing assertions of the smart city as a disciplinary strategy. The NAC has become a vehicle for the amplification of existing social, political, and economic inequalities with the added bonus of serving as a propaganda tool for the regime.
Conclusion
The main thing I took away from my -too brief- return to Cairo was bread. Nearly every person I spoke to was concerned about the price of bread, of petrol, of cigarettes. Any talk of infrastructural development, or the proposed new capital city was met with the Egyptian equivalent of an eye roll, an assertion that despite its shiny veneer, this project was simply more of the same.
With more than three dozen smart cities projected to be constructed in Egypt, and a target population of more than 15 million, every tenth inhabitant will potentially live in a smart city by 2030, underscoring both how vast these initiatives are, but also how disconnected from the lives of the everyday Cairean.
These smart city projects encapsulate everything about the post-2011 Egyptian state:
There is to be no politics in the city. Whatever the outcome of the plan to move the capital, it has already revealed the government’s twisted vision of the ideal city: minutely planned, shiny, ordered, self-contained, and insulated from the population. An anti-Cairo.
And in fact, those new highways I was so surprised by were simply part of a larger vision of “transforming the old city into one big flyover heading towards the new administrative capital”, at the expense of historic districts and public transport initiatives.
The Egypt I remembered was crowded, yes, but diverse and beautiful. The Egypt I returned to was a stark reminder of an ongoing power struggle, a president haunted by the mass mobilisation against oppression seen in 2011. Far from techno-utopian, this smart city seems to be yet another vehicle of Egyptian political repression.
